The League of STEAM (Supernatural and Troublesome Ectoplasmic Apparition Management) is an organization comprised of Inventors, Scientists, Adventurers, Craftsmen, Monster and Creature Hunters, and Paranormal Researchers.
What’s not to love?
The League of S.T.E.A.M. have released eight videos to date, including “Monkey Business” in which their ghost-busting efforts are not quite so successful, and “Big Trouble“, in which the team defeat a near-sighted troll with the best use of a robot ever.
I love steampunk. And silent movies. And robots with punchcards.
The wonderful blog Gyllene Gryningen has a great post titled “Genie or Genius?” which delves into the history and mythology of the djinn, also discussing possible elemental correspondences. Very nifty.
Someone’s started a fan page on Facebookfor people interested in Buying Crowley Books. They’ve even got a Twitteraccount (@crowleybooks) now. Via these methods they share info about good places to buy Crowley’s works as so much of it has gone out of print. As of this writing the Facebook page has nearly 700 fans.
In Letters from Hardscrabble Creek, Chas Clifton wrote a bit about a website he came across which focused on “Having Sex With Ghosts“. Gina “Gnothz” Lanier (what’s a “gnothz”?) is a self-described paranormal investigator who wants to hear about your intimidate relations with the dead. They’re not even funny. One woman complains about obscene phone calls from the dead. It’s just sad. For the voyeuristic with no sense of web design, here’s Real Sex with Ghosts. Oh dear.
Got a cool link? Please share it in the comments, or if you use delicious, tag it “plutonica” and we’ll take a look. Thanks!
Hallowe’en’s but a few short weeks away, and it’s supposed to be the time of the dead, when “the veils are thinnest ‘tween worlds”. Yet, outside obvious fiction, when was the last time you heard of a young ghost?
Recently I reviewed Claude Lecouteux’s The Return of the Dead for SpiralNature.com. In it, the author delves into Germanic and Scandinavian folklore to discover their pre-Christian beliefs about death and the afterlife, focusing on ghosts and revenants in particular.
He was writing of a time when they were taken to be a very real phenomena, yet for the mainstream, this no longer holds. He writes:
In terms of evolution, having suffered the outrages of time and history, revenants have lost almost everything that distinguished them: their physicality and their powers. They no longer kill or threaten, nor do they perform domestic tasks. They are no longer the tutelary or wicked spirits of an earlier age. Ordinarily, they appear mute, using their eyes or gestures to express what they wish to say, but they no longer have the power to express themselves with words because they are no longer of this world.
for 
